The present disclosure relates generally to the field of interactive education and, more particularly, to an interactive education system for teaching patient care protocols.
While it is desirable to train students in patient care protocols before allowing contact with real patients, textbooks and flash cards lack the important benefit to students attained from “hands-on” practice. Thus, patient care education has often been taught using devices, such as a manikin configured to simulate a patient, along with corresponding medical instruments to perform patient care activity. However, one disadvantage of such a system is that medical instruments are often prohibitively expensive, and consequently, many users must settle for using a smaller variety of instruments, even at the cost of a less comprehensive educational experience. One solution to the foregoing problem is using a set of relatively inexpensive, simulated medical instruments (“virtual” instruments), as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,853,292, the entire disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Another problem in patient care education is teaching a user to locate and interpret certain patient body sounds. Charts or displays of audible locations are of little practical value, for they do not provide the user with some form of realistic feedback, such as audio, visual, or tactile responses to the user's activity. For example, knowing that an apex heart sound is heard at the fifth intercostal space along the midclavicular line is a very different matter from actually finding the location and recognizing the sound on a patient. In an attempt to provide a more realistic experience, prior methods have disposed speakers playing body sounds at locations throughout a manikin, but this is undesirable, as speakers have a tendency to reverberate throughout the manikin, thus allowing an unnatural juxtaposition of normally distal sounds. Moreover, even if only one sound is played at a time, the nature of a speaker results in the sound being heard over a wider anatomical area than would be found in a real patient, thus reinforcing sloppy sound location and detection by the user.
Still another problem in patient care education is teaching the user to recognize physiological symptoms and to respond to such symptoms appropriately. However, such responses are generally not particularly realistic due to constraints in the educational environment, such as difficulties in simulating physiological behavior.
Therefore, what is needed is an interactive education system using both real and virtual instruments, in cooperation with simulated patient treatment, for rewarding the user with realistic audible or visual feedback. What is also needed is an interactive system that exhibits realistic physiological behavior, thereby enabling the user to interpret and respond to such behavior.